Many businesses operate using a variety of older heterogeneous technologies, business applications, and other technological business resources, collectively known as “legacy systems,” to perform different business transactions. For example, legacy systems may be used for consumer transactions, payroll systems, and business data management. In order to meet the changing needs of a business, legacy systems are gradually modified and extended over many years, and often become fundamental to the performance and success of the business.
It is often the case that such legacy systems cannot be efficiently replaced due to their complexity, size, fragmented nature, and/or interconnections with other systems. However, as the modern economy becomes more technologically complex and business requirements and opportunities change, many businesses require cross-enterprise collaborations among existing legacy systems and other business technologies, applications, and resources, as well as integration with new external technologies and systems, such as business-to-consumer and/or business-to-business applications. Similarly, an organization often inherits various systems from corporate acquisitions or acquires systems that become unsupported over time. Integrating these systems into existing infrastructure and maintaining these systems may involve redundant functionality and data, and eliminating those redundancies can be difficult and expensive. Conventionally, integrating, reducing and eliminating redundancies, and/or extending existing business technologies and applications, or integrating existing business technologies and applications with newer systems is difficult because of inconsistent interfaces, fragmented, differently formatted, and/or redundant data sources, and inflexible architectures.
It is with these problems in mind, among others, that various aspects of the present disclosure were conceived.